TURNING A BLIND EYE INTERNATIONALLY WILL COST US

By John McLaughlin

 
In the world of intelligence — my former profession — the most difficult thing to detect is the point in global events when barely noticeable incremental changes accumulate like a snowball rolling downhill, achieve critical mass and suddenly produce something unexpected. This usually catches most everyone by surprise. It can be a revolution, a coup, an economic collapse or even a new alliance.

Such things rarely happen overnight and when they do burst into view, many people hasten to label it an “intelligence failure” — the default reaction when something unexpected happens in the world.

A perfect illustration of this was the Arab Spring that exploded in 2011. Pressures for change had been building for years in the Arab world, but it took an obscure Tunisian fruit seller in late 2010 to provide the spark — quite literally. When he set himself on fire to protest treatment by Tunisian authorities, it triggered a chain reaction of upheaval in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria — the latter three turning into still-hot civil wars.

My point is that there is a lot going on in the world right now that is either too complicated, unsettled or obscure to pull our focus away from COVID-19 dangers rightly commanding our attention. Yet, international politics and competition go on — with much less direct involvement or influence from the U.S. than at any time in the last 70 years. This will all leave a legacy that Washington will have to confront at some point. From a a long list of cases, here are just three examples: first a country, then a partnership and then a global trend.

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Πηγή: ozy.com

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